It was the middle of winter, the nights were cold and we needed some firewood for our little combustion heater. Out I went with my 2 times hand-me-down Husqvarna 136 chainsaw to cut some wood up. After only a minute of cutting the blade began to smoke. Despite the cold I thought “That ain’t right”[..more..]

A while back I wrote an article about attempting to make money online since that article quite a few things have changed. Previously I had a website http://wattsituse.com/ which turned out to be a waste of time. Not because of the lack of a good idea but because of the time required to make[..more..]

Having moved into our new home, it was time to get internet access up and running. We have no fixed phone line and with us both having mobile phones had no intention to get one. Hence we began looking into what wireless options were available. Eventually we settled on a 3G wireless mobile broad band[..more..]

Wow, has it really been that long already?… It’s now July 24th 2010, and Carly, Mitchell and I took final hand over of our new Format Homes built house way back in February 3rd 2010. We are so happy to be in our new house. It’s amazing when something that you both design, plan, follow[..more..]

Recently a port audit security advisor was released that indicated an exploit with sudoedit of the security/sudo FreeBSD port. At the time I was running sudo 1.6.9 and being a responsible system administrator, I decided to upgrade sudo to the latest revision of the port (1.7.2p2 at the time). The upgrade went very smoothly, with[..more..]

Recently I was working on a php command line program that required access to a serial port. Initially developed under Linux the program was then shifted to it’s permanent location on a FreeBSD server. This is where we first started having problems. Initially we discovered the server didn’t have a native serial port. We fixed[..more..]

With Christmas just around the corner it’s time for another house update. Things have progressed quite a bit since the last update but also a lot slower. The house has finally reached lockup and hence we only get to see what’s happening when trades men are around. Format Homes have continued working on the house[..more..]

In building our new house we decided to install a solar hot water system. The reasons for this was simple. We have no mains electricity and only LPG bottled gas. Hence continually heating water would have cost us a lot. Solar hot water on the other hand has an upfront cost but substantially reduces the[..more..]